Drug addicts paid to be sterilised

[MarthaQuest]

In today's Guardian

I thought I was left wing, but I found myself agreeing with most of this article.

What do you all think?

Anyway, I have to go and give my children some attention, I have been irresponsibly typing away on here for hours

toc, if thats the message thats sent out, that is wrong...you culd be right. but thias wouldnt be just for the non middle classes, it would be for all. you're right that £300 would be a bigger carrot to some which would cause selection bias - otoh grabbing the middle classes with a bigger carrot (mortgage paid off !) would be wrong as well. Incentives such as HIP grant are offered to all, non means tested, but obviously there is a huge hoop to jump through for this one.
I also think that just because a 'project' can't address all issdues, that doesn't mean it should be scrapped if it'd do some good. But of course that doesn't mean it can demonise certain groups of people, and if that's the case then i agree with you.

enjoy your date my o has sorted itself out...probably was crumbs!

how about a cash incentive for every used condom??

not sure who she is riven, but I'd say yes, except I've swapped sides, so no. iyswim

lol Stealth

Sterilisation is too extreme, this woman also pays people to have iuds fitted or implants(I think).
I read about this on the bbc news website a while back. You can see her point of view from what I remember she has adopted 4-5 babies from one addict mother who had all her children taken in to care.
When the babies were born they had to suffer terrible withdrawal and were then left with other health problems too. So this woman has personal experience.
Again though although I sympathise with her aims I think permanent sterilisation is one step too far. Drug addicts are ill, if you had another illness that meant if you got pregnant the baby was going to be born with severe health problems I think most people would want to use a very safe method of contraception.
Oh I'm really torn over this; it really is very cynical to pay drug addicts to offer them the service of free long term contraception would be a better answer.

i really do think for me the main issue is she ois saying this is what the women themselves want. Well if that's the case lets up the ease of access to and promotion of contraceptives to addicts (and i'm almost certain in this country it'll be heavily done anyway and get rid of the cash incentive which just clouds the issue.
After all if she was handing out leaflets and offering advice and to accompany women to get contraception, no one would have any problem with that at all.

davina mccall
and hundreds of others

mrsruffalo. I am not sure why you have included the pill in your list. That would not be a suitable option for someone with a chaotic lifestyle, and is not being offered by this organisation. i imagine you included it as it is a non-invasive procedure, to try and divert attention from the fact that having a coil fitted or a long term implant are invasive procedures. And that you wnated these procedures to be forced.

And your original post said "forced birth control is again, a very good idea for those who are too irresponsible to give their children a good start in life " which I took to mean that you wanted to force these people to undergo procedures before they had the children. I was wondering what your selection criteria are.

You then go on to talk about "violent drug addicts". I am sure you are aware that not all drug addicts are violent. But that children of drug addicts are likely to suffer difficulties of various types whether they are violent or not.

you seem to have astereotype in your head of what a "drug addict" is, and are then concluding that basically they have lost their right to be treated as human beings, and must be prevented from reproducing.

What is this business about middle class alcoholics not reproducing? What did you mean by that?

sorry, what about davina??

I find it peculiar that any rational person could support this.

The drugs are the problem, not the babies. Plenty of people have risen above less than ideal origins and gone on to play a constructive role in society, and to be happy and fulfilled

why not spend the money and the energy on continuing and improving measures to combat drug addiction and poverty? Not so glamorous or headline-winning, I suppose

i didn't know that always thought she was whiter than white

Agree with SPB

The backdrop of this is that women in US generally have to pay for contraception. Thus women who are addicts are unlikely to spend their money on contraception when they could spend it on drugs. Ditto if a drug addict in US wanted a coil fitted or to be sterilised she would have to pay.

Then there is the US attitude to abortion, the idea that drug addicts may become pregnant and then access abortions is (as you can imagine) a huge huge deal in US. (Obviously it is terrible everywhere, but the pro-life lobby in US is a lot more vocal and extreme than here).

So when you put all of those things together, then maybe offering money for long term contraception in US makes sense. Not sterilisation, obviously. The point being that in the US, the women can;t make that choice as it'll cost them. (There are some free clinics I think, but it's a general principle).

In teh UK, contraception is frely available and heavilty promoted, Women who are drug addicts will be offered long term contraceptive solutions by their GP, outreach workers, all sorts of agencies. If they have not taken it up, maybe there is a reason why. Bribing them to do it seems wrong. And the way the payments are fixed - you get a big lump sum for sterilisation, smaller paynents over a period of time for otehr methods - well if you want the cash for drugs you're going to go for option A.

The whole thing is totally immoral. Before we even get into the fact that this affects women more than men, that it is people in poverty who are being targetted etc etc.

I live in a community with a big heroin addict problem, my opinion is informed and not based on stereotypes but real life experience

Sigh, I did not say that all drug addicts were violent , I gave it as an example

You have purposefully misunderstood me again and again, which makes for a dull debate

I do not see how paying a heroin addict to have some form of temporary contraception whilst addicted to drugs and living a 'chaotic' life as you put it is in any way not treating them as a human being. It is better for the woman, and the baby and society at large. Most female drug addicts will turn to prostitution at some point. These are not babies being born into a safe environment.

Anyway, it's been fun debating with you, I have found it informative and interesting
but, shame, I really must go

forcing people to undergo contraceptive procedures is a breach of their human right

I am not purposefully misunderstanding you, maybe you aren't getting your points across very well?

I am still baffled about the "middle class alcoholics aren't reproducing" thing.

Anyway I'm going to a BBQ soon as well, have a nice afternoon (not passive aggressive!)

I don't know where I would stand on paying people to have a contraceptive injection. It seems okay to me, and yet of course it doesn't target rich people. But forcing anyone to undergo any procedure is a horrendous idea. Although Emin's tale is very sad, it is wrong to force anyone to undergo a procedure, temporary or permanant, that has no health benefits to them personally, and also carries a risk to them e.g. side effects from injection, risks from medical operation. Ialso wonder what these 'selection criteria' are Mrsruffalo?
Going back to my earlier post, I found out that under Hitler's regime a few alcoholics were forcibly sterilised, so unfortunately people have had this kind of idea before
But I stand where I did before. You can't offer desperate women in poverty, who happen to be drug addicts, a permanent procedure when I do not believe they are in a well enough state of mind to make a fully informed decision. Yes, many of thse women have had it said to them that they are worthless again and again, or people have constantly implied this when talking to them. They see no future for themselves, they feel worthless, they don't see themselves coming off drugs. But they might in the future, and if they were sterlilised they are screwed, as I said before.
By the way, if anyone is talking about forcibly sterilising people (and I don't mean you Mrsruffalo, I think you're advocating for forced contraception?), then I believe that a widespread government policy of forced sterilisaion is recognised as a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute, just so everyone knows!

The sad truth is, that you are both more likely to become addicted to drugs if you are poor and more likely to become poor if you're addicted to drugs.

Making this a class issue isn't helping I think.

Paying drug addicts to take long term contraception is a great idea. Paying them to be sterilised - no. Regardless of what the law says about capacity and consent, I cannot morally agree that a drug addict can really consent to anything with money involved.

I know loads of people who have had issues with drugs, none of whom are dirt poor/estate dwellers. Cocaine is in every single pub in the country near enough. This idea that only poor people are addicts is such utter rubbish. It is poor people who have more problems dealing with addiction as it is harder for them to find the money.

Heroin should be given to addicts by doctors, it is a clean drug, not my choice of narcotic but people can and do have regular lives if their addiction is helped in this way.

I mean, by all accounts, Hamid Karzai is a smack addict. He is president of Afghanistan. A shit one maybe, but it just shows what you can do on smack if you have a nice clean source.

I forget his name, but the John Major govt produced a white paper on health in its dying days, and the author was a junkie who prescribed himself smack...

Smack should be available on licence to all, available to addicts from the NHS...

these people arent being forced though are they? they are accepting a payment in return for proving they have been sterilised/had a long term contraceptive. no one is saying this is going to be forced onto them, it will be offered to them for them to accept or decline.

they are not being forced as such but the issue of consent is a murky one if they desperately need money (I say if - am aware lots won't) and it is being dangled in front of them

question is - do they want to do it?
If so they can, regardless of money
If not then money shouldn't be offered to bribe them to do it

If we decriminalised drugs and taxed them we could probably afford to rehabilitate addicts.

As they tend to be net takers it's not viable to rehabilitate them.

Bloody good idea.